We all recognize that football is a very physically demanding game. What these players put their bodies through is nothing short of abuse. Take a look at all of the lawsuits that are being filed by former players who are now limited physically due to what the NFL put them through. The average NFL career lasts just three and a half years, and thus, the turnover of NFL players is quite high. Even those who have a long career in the NFL have a very limited window of peak production years. It is those players who are at the pinnacle of their production that we target in fantasy football.
Fantasy football has been around long enough that we have seen plenty of trends develop and lots of them change or die out. One of the most constant elements over the past 20 years in projecting a player’s fantasy value is their age. Granted, the peak age for a player varies depending on what position they play and, in some cases, in how much college ball they have played as well.
Quarterbacks have the largest peak production years of any position in football other than punter, placekicker and long snapper. However, young quarterbacks (age 22-24) do not perform very well whatsoever. As you see in the chart below, quarterbacks between 22 and 24 years of age average between 8-14 fantasy points per game.
But something seems to happen as a quarterback hits age 25 as that’s when every major statistic rises sharply. In last year’s guide, we identified Andrew Luck as the player to watch out for as he had just turned 25 and was entering his third year in the NFL. Over the past 20 years, both of those indicators have proven to elevate a quarterback’s fantasy production significantly. This season, there are two players that have our attention despite neither being fantasy favorites: Robert Griffin III and Geno Smith. Although both players appear to be busts, neither their teams nor fantasy owners should give up on them yet until they struggle into their prime years.
In analyzing the age factors, we come to the conclusion that quarterbacks are at the peak of their fantasy performance between the ages of 25 and 30. The great thing about quarterbacks as opposed to other positions is that they remain productive well into their late thirties, which is absolutely unheard of at other positions. In fact, these number fell off even more sharply just three years ago before players like Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Drew Brees maintained their production well into their late thirties.
The running back position is, without question, a young man’s game. I often say that you want to have a running back on your fantasy team before he is institutionalized. What I mean by that is that at the NFL level, running backs are taught to save their bodies, take on less contact and run the play as it is drawn up. Rookie running backs haven’t learned that yet, so you can watch them run with reckless abandon in trying to take every single carry to the house. They haven’t yet been trained to go down when they are wrapped up, to go out of bounds to save themselves a hit or to settle for whatever chunks of yardage their blocking provides.
Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that NFL running backs’ peak years are very early on in their career. By the time an NFL running back hits the age of 30, his body is pretty much shot and his fantasy value follows that trend as well.
There was a popular belief years ago that a starting wide receiver who was entering his third season was destined to breakout. That theory worked out quite a bit back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it doesn’t hold up as well any more.
Whether it is their second, third or fourth year, the bottom line is that wide receivers usually take several years before hitting their stride and a bit longer to hit their peak. However, this trend is beginning to change as more and more rookie wide receivers are being taken high in the draft and given a chance to develop as a starter right away. Furthermore, unlike the running back position, fantasy wide receivers can maintain consistent production well into their 30s.
The final spot we will look at is the tight end position. TEs are difficult to gauge, as they seem to develop at all different times. Thus we can come to the conclusion that the TE position is very reliant on the offensive scheme. The better ages for TEs as you can see from the chart below seems to be around age 30. Young TEs don’t seem to make that big of an impact whereas the few TEs who actually play deep into their 30s actually are significant contributors.
So as you can see age plays a pretty important role in how a player performs in terms of fantasy football. It’s important that we use this data, as it is tried and true and will help us significantly make better decisions both in the draft and during the season.